You can finally store your Google Play Music songs on your SD card

One of my biggest complaints about Google Play Music was that the app could only store “pinned” music (music downloaded for offline listening) to a device’s internal storage. Only have 4GB of internal storage but have 32GB of sweet microSD card space to fill? Tough luck.

Not any more, though, as the latest Google Play Music upgrade finally brings us the ability to store cached music to the SD card. This should give users as much space as they need to have tons of their tunes available for those times when a strong internet connection isn’t handy. Beyond that, you now have the ability to share various tracks you’ve bought.

While you’ve been able to share certain tracks and libraries to Google+ in the past, this new option now allows you to share music to any app (it’ll come up in the form of a link). The upgrade should be in the Google Play Store soon, but this is a staggered rollout so if you don’t see it right away then you’ll just have to be a patient Patty and wait a bit.

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will this update finally allow apps like zombies run to tap into Google play music for playlists instead of relying on winamp and physically transferring music from computer to phone? fingers crossed

Roemraw

I wonder if they will ever allow that. Because what’s to stop a person with all access to pay for 1 month’s worth, download 100s of albums, transferring them to a pc and then canceling the subscription?

MisterMints

isn’t that service more of a streaming radio type thing than downloads? so if someone did sign up for a month nothing would be downloaded…?

Roemraw

I have the month trial version active now and I can add new songs to my playlists which are then made available offline on my phone.

ac

It’s about time!

New_Guy777

And it works totally freaking awesome! All of my cached music was automatically moved straight to my SD Card, and really freed things up!

xc

Will it automatically move all your cached music to the SD card … or do you have to clear the cache and then re-download to the SD?

https://plus.google.com/108596272537415356460/posts Jason Farrell

Not sure. I cleared data just to be safe, but I was moving over from using a 3rd-party Music2SD Xposed module anyway, and wanted a fresh start.

New_Guy777

Just got the update, and it moves it automatically. IT ROCKS!

CLKeenan

Really? I still see Google Music taking up 2+ GBs on my internal device memory. I don’t think it moved it to the ext. SD card.

New_Guy777

Did you go into settings and select the external option? I did, and about half an hour later I noticed a pin notification showing it moving the music to my external

CLKeenan

I did. Maybe it’s just taking a little longer to do it for me. I’ll hold off before I do anything drastic like wiping the app’s data and then re-downloading everything.

When are they going to fix the fact that I can’t listen to my music that is stored on the cloud but also happens to be on my SD card already, on my chromecast. It doesn’t recognize the fact that my songs are on the cloud because they are also written on the SD card

New_Guy777

OK, let me get this straight. I think you’re saying that you have music on your SD card on your phone, and you want to play it to the Chromecast. If that’s all, this is a no-brainer. Just upload the music to Google Music, then it can stream down to the Chromecast. Music isn’t playing from your phone to the Chromecast…your phone is simply a remote. When you’re streaming music to the Chromecast, it’s coming directly from Google’s cloud servers…basically, the music is originating from outside of your house. So, Google Music will play the MP3’s on your phone, but you can take advantage of the free 20,000 song uploads that Google Music offers to back your entire music library to the cloud, and then bring it down to the Chromecast. Google even upgrades your music in case you ripped it from a CD at a low bitrate, or even in mono. It becomes hi-def with stereo.

AndroidProfit

ROCKS that they did that $7.99 promotion! Badass that it is still $7.99! I just wish they had a multiple user account. I suppose I could create a family gmail and the 3 of us could all sign into that gmail and use 1 all access account.

https://plus.google.com/108596272537415356460/posts Jason Farrell

Yes – THIS.

I’d even pay a little extra for a family share account.

CGS

And what if we want to be Impatient Inez rather than Patient Patty?

New_Guy777

My S3 was updated today, so there’s hope you’ll get it really soon.

jd_from_da_80s

Now if only I could get the music I download instead of the edited versions.

https://plus.google.com/108596272537415356460/posts Jason Farrell

You can fix that on the web version of Google Music, by telling it to actually upload your explicit version of songs via MusicManager, instead of using the matched versions when it initially quick-uploaded

For the last couple months I’ve been using the Music2SD Xposed module for the same effect, but now I no longer need it after sideloading the new GMusic apk (from AndroidPolice).

I sure hope this feature stays, since it was present before — though hidden — and then removed.

New_Guy777

I’d say that this will stick, as Music automatically moves the cached files from your internal memory to your external once you tick the check box. It’s really awesome!

Delmar

Another kit kat exclusive (Galaxy Note 3)

Joshua Hill

No joy for Galaxy S2 users. Stuff you Google!

Rob Schoenfeld

Galaxy 2 root rom take matters into your hands.

Joshua Hill

According to another S2 user the way Samsung mounts and file formats the ext SD it won’t matter anyway.

Google should standardise the file format system for both internal and external storage. I was very surprised to recently learn different OEM’s use different file formats on the main internal storage.

New_Guy777

S3 worked…there’s definitely hope that it’ll be supported soon!

Joshua Hill

S3 and S4 both work so I’m hoping in a future update Google will get this sorted but I’m not optimistic.

New_Guy777

I would be…the hardware isn’t that different, and I don’t think the file system or OS version is different at all at this point between the S3 and the S2. It’s listed as experimental in the app description…they’re probably just making sure the devices they’ve already tested it on don’t hiccup too badly before rolling it out to all with SD cards

Joshua Hill

S2 is only 4.1.2 I think S3 is 4.2 or 4.3. The file format probably is the same although I have no idea if it is.

Anyway I’ve got my fingers crossed.

New_Guy777

No, my S3 is still on 4.1.2. It has an update available as of two weeks ago, but I stayed back because the new update is supposed to be really horrible..

Chris Cosgrove

Finally! I got the S4 GPE and oh, i have a nice 64GB sd card to put in here…no wait…all my music is still on internal storage.

Alu Zeros

Nice, makes galaxy s4 gpe sweeter

skirlofthepipes

This is great news; now I may just end up using Google Music as my sole music app. I still think Amazon’s is more intuitive, though; for example, with Google’s I still can’t figure out a way to “pin” individual tracks from the cloud instead of the entire playlist or album. And why not just use the word “download” instead of the cryptic “pin?” I love Google products but sometimes in their innovation they make things a little less intuitive.

Caloy

Last time I bought music from Google, I had trouble getting it to play on my preferred media player. I won’t be buying music from Google again when there are much better options.

http://www.k1nsey6.com K1nsey6

Now mediaserver eats the hell out of my battery. Even well after I stopped using The app.